A new instrument in the string quartet

With “All Fours,” his newest large-scale group piece, modern dance choreographer Mark Morris has made the improbable possible. He’s created a dance to a Bartok string quartet -- which may be a first for anyone -- and he’s also made this thorny, intricate music more legible. That’s what people mean when they talk about Morris’ musicality.

Given its local premiere Friday by the Mark Morris Dance Group at UCLA’s Royce Hall as part of the UCLA Live series, the work revealed pretty much all of Morris’ strengths. It also, unfortunately, pointed up some of his weaknesses.

As usual, Morris has choreographed the music to a fare-thee-well. Using Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet, he’s matched the composer’s mosaic style of combining short, shifting motives with equally distinct choreographic units. These include hands clasped in prayer, flexed wrists and feet, arms flung back in Winged Victory images, and a “listening” motif in which dancers cup one hand to an ear and thrust out the other arm.

Morris has found visual equivalents for the music’s varying textures and dynamics. When the score gets big and loud, the stage picture gets full. When it gets intimate, the stage picture becomes small. When the music is energized, so is the movement. And vice versa. All this happens with an ease and naturalness that hides the high level of the choreographer’s craft and insight.

The problems begin with the arbitrariness of the images, which take note of changes in the music but without connecting with each other or with the music’s logic and character. As if to fill the gap, Morris adds a vague dramatic plot by contrasting two groups -- a mostly unison octet in black and a character quartet in white.

In the central movement, the quartet (Craig Biesecker, Marjorie Folkman, Bradon McDonald and Julie Worden) explore some sexual tension amid ill-defined relationships between both the boys and the girls. But the characters are generic and their problems remain gratuitous. And it all seems pretty remote from Bartok’s very emotional music.

Indeed, you can sense very early on that the choreographic project will be to integrate the two groups, and, yes, they finally do come together, to share each other’s movement motifs in a grand recapitulation. But this looks like a formal and abstract design solution that carries little emotional weight.

To add to the drama, Nicole Pearce provided abrupt lighting changes, from blood red to blue and back again. Martin Pakledinaz designed the costumes. Bartok’s music was played by violinists Jonathan Gandelsman and John Kelly Andersen, violist Jessica Troy and cellist Wolfram Koessel.

Similar strengths and problems were easier to see in Morris’ “V,” which received its local premiere in 2002 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre: fluid, meticulously worked-out choreography that does not connect with the passion in Schumann’s familiar Quintet in E-flat for piano and strings. Bartok may be hard for people to relate to, but Schumann’s score is anything but remote. The music was played somewhat wanly by Gandelsman, Andersen, Troy, Koessell and pianist Steven Beck.

The program opened with Morris’ fun piece “Going Away Party,” set to a group of eight recorded country and western songs by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. It also included the witty and ironic “A Spell,” danced strongly by McDonald, Charlton Boyd and Amber Merkens. Eileen Clark was the sweet-voiced soprano. Gandelsman was the violinist, and Beck was the pianist.